One of the notable aspects of this update was the removal of mineral drops from drone NPCs and the removal of tech I ship fittings from all NPC drops. Both of these were very significant sources of mineral in the New Eden economy.

The intent of this was to spur mining and make it a more profitable venture.

So you would assume that mining activity would be on the rise post-Escalation. And there was an increase some regions of space.

Compared to the 7 day average before Escalation, the last 7 days have seen a 45.53% decrease in average m3 of ore mined within high sec.

Ouch, a 45% dive!

Of course, Hulkageddon is under way. And Hulkageddon targets are primarily in high security space. So most of those (as of this moment) nearly 4,000 dead mining ships on the leaderboard were in high sec.

The targets are in high sec for two reasons.

First, in low, null, and WH space, miners already have to take defensive precautions every day. Hulkageddon in null sec, for example, is pretty much a non-event.

Second, most of the miners in the game are in high sec space. CCP_Diagoras put up one more factoid that illustrates this very well.

Average mined per day for the last 7 days: High (1.47bn m3), Low (13.8m m3), Null (796m m3), WH (112m m3)

So even with a 45% drop in high sec mining, it is still the place where most of the ore is harvested. High sec accounts for nearly double the ore as the rest of space, even with Hulkageddon in full forces.

I hope we’ll get to see some 7 day yields in the post-Hulkageddon time frame to see how much ore high sec miners will be pulling in when the threat of gank has been (mostly) removed.

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10 thoughts on “The Tug of War Between Escalation and Hulkageddon”

I’m still mining in hisec, between missions, manufacturing, and invention. I have yet to be ganked, (or even see anyone from the Hulkageddon leaderboard in local) but I tend to warp out immediately and go do something else if I see anyone who looks like they might be scouting.

I hate to go off topic but the thing that really jumps out from those figure is how badly neglected Low Sec is. It really is the lost region of EVE. Null sec and Worm holes are dangerous but have high rewards. High Sec has low rewards but is safe. Low sec has low rewards and is not safe so everybody (except for pirates) hates it.

I guess it’s not surprising that low-sec is the lowest, but I must confess to being a little surpised at just how low it is.

I don’t mine personally, but I did pull an industrial load out of lowsec the other day – I was scanning, found a dark ochre grav site, and decided it was worth a leisurely mine, just for a change. Remarkable to think that my 9000 m3 is almost 1/1000 of the entire low-sec yield for the week!

The only way to make Low-sec interesting is to remove the static sec status. Allow system up to 0.7 to become 0.4 if enough ganks take place in that system and neighboring low sec systems. It will never happen, but it would truly be a sandbox if player actions could force Concord to abandon a system because they couldn’t “fight” all the criminals.

Low-sec could never become 0.0, but every system could have its sec status lowered 0.3 to a minimum of 0.1

@grombeck The only way to make that work would be to allow the reverse in some way. That systems could increase their security level through some mechanism. Though I doubt that either thing will happen.

Personally I think the way to improve the desirability of low-sec would be to increase the relative availabilty of some important resource in the low-sec systems. Either by increasing availability in low sec or decreasing it elsewhere, or both. I think the best approach would have random spawning depletable resources to encourage mobility rather than camping on the spawn as we see with Tech.

They already have the mechanics in place with both faction warfare and incursions. Allow the pirate players to decalre for a pirate faction. All empire factions would be against them. It could possibly be the one thing that would make faction warfare decent. For programing all CCP has to do is adjust when the NPC police and Concord spawn. Gate guns would be changed.

the only downside to increasing the security level of a sector would be if someone had a moon mining setup running. How would the sec change affect thier system? The ability to mine in 0.3 space would be lost with a 0.1 increase. What would happen to the mining pos’s already running?

Actually I would expect exactly the opposite of Concord in the sight of more ganking. In that the more ganking in a system the more it’s security status should go up. The quieter a system is gank wise the fewer resources Concord would devote to the system. This would be interesting as it would create constant movement as players avoiding the dangers of low sec would need to constantly move to stay in safe neighborhoods.